{"id":6817,"date":"2024-03-14T13:13:41","date_gmt":"2024-03-14T17:13:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/rachel-carsons-lost-serenade-to-the-science-of-the-clouds-found-and-illustrated-by-artist-nikki-mcclure-the-marginalian\/"},"modified":"2024-03-14T13:13:41","modified_gmt":"2024-03-14T17:13:41","slug":"rachel-carsons-lost-serenade-to-the-science-of-the-clouds-found-and-illustrated-by-artist-nikki-mcclure-the-marginalian","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/parmaks.com\/Resources\/rachel-carsons-lost-serenade-to-the-science-of-the-clouds-found-and-illustrated-by-artist-nikki-mcclure-the-marginalian\/","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Carson\u2019s Lost Serenade to the Science of the Clouds, Found and Illustrated by Artist Nikki McClure \u2013 The Marginalian"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Profit<\/a>
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\"Something<\/a><\/p>\n

A version of this essay appeared in The New York Times Book Review<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

A cloud is a spell against indifference, an emblem of the water cycle<\/a> that makes this planet a living world capable of trees and tenderness, a great cosmic gasp at the improbability that such a world exists, that across the cold expanse of spacetime strewn with billions upon billions of other star systems, there is nothing like it as far as we yet know. <\/p>\n

Clouds are almost as old as this world, born when primordial volcanos first exhaled the chemistry of the molten planet into the sky, but their science is younger than the steam engine. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the chemist and amateur meteorologist Luke Howard, still in his twenties, noticed that clouds form in particular shapes under particular conditions. He set out to devise a classification system modeled on the newly popular Linnaean taxonomy of the living world, naming the three main classes cumulus<\/em>, stratus<\/em>, and cirrus<\/em>, then braiding them into various sub-taxonomies.<\/p>\n

When a German translation reached Goethe, the polymathic poet with a passion for morphology was so inspired that he sent fan mail to the young man who \u201cdistinguished cloud from cloud,\u201d then composed a suite of verses for each of the main classes<\/a>. It was Goethe\u2019s poetry, translating the lexicon of an obscure science into the language of wonder, that popularized the cloud names we use today.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Rachel Carson, 1951<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A century and a half later, six years before Rachel Carson<\/a> awakened the modern ecological conscience with her book Silent Spring<\/em><\/a> and four years after The Sea Around Us<\/em><\/a> earned her the National Book Award as \u201ca work of scientific accuracy presented with poetic imagination,\u201d the television program Omnibus<\/em> approached her to write \u201csomething about the sky,\u201d in response to a request from a young viewer. <\/p>\n

This became the title of the segment that aired on March 11, 1956 \u2014 a soulful serenade to the science of the clouds, emanating Carson\u2019s ethos that \u201cthe more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although celebrated for her books about the sea, Carson\u2019s literary career had begun in the sky. She was only eleven when her story \u201cA Battle in the Clouds\u201d \u2014 a tale inspired by her brother\u2019s time in the Army Air Service during World War I \u2014 was published in the popular young people\u2019s magazine St. Nicholas<\/em>, where the early writings of Edna St. Vincent Millay, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and E. E. Cummings also appeared. Despite her family\u2019s meager means \u2014 a neighbor would recall stopping by at dinnertime and finding the Carsons gathered around a single bowl of apples \u2014 she enrolled in a women\u2019s college aided by a $100 scholarship from a state competition, intent on studying literature at a time when fewer than four percent of women graduated from a four-year university. <\/p>\n

And then, the way all great transformations slip in through the backdoor of the mansion of our plans, her life took a turn that shaped her future and the history of literature. <\/p>\n

To meet the college science requirement she had put off for a year, Carson took an introductory biology course. She found herself enchanted by both the subject and its teacher: Miss Mary Scott Skinker, who wore miniskirts, taught cutting-edge disciplines like genetics and microbiology, and gave enthralling lectures on evolution and natural history that awakened in her students an awareness of the interdependence of life that would never leave Carson. By nineteen, she had changed her major to biology. But she never lost her love of literature. \u201cI have always wanted to write,\u201d Carson told her lab partner late one night. \u201cBiology has given me something to write about.\u201d She was also writing poetry, submitting it to various magazines, receiving rejection slip after rejection slip. <\/p>\n

Somewhere along the way, as she followed in Skinker\u2019s footsteps to the Woods Hole Marine Biological Observatory, then worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, writing reports her boss deemed far too lyrical<\/a> for a government publication and encouraged her to submit to The Atlantic Monthly<\/em>, Carson realized that poetry lives in innumerable guises beyond verse, that the task of science is to discover the \u201cwonder and beauty and majesty\u201d inherent in nature. A lifetime later, she would rise from the table she shared with the poet Marianne Moore to receive her National Book Award with these words<\/a>: <\/p>\n

\n

The aim of science is to discover and illuminate truth. And that, I take it, is the aim of literature, whether biography or history or fiction; it seems to me, then, that there can be no separate literature of science.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

If there was poetry in her writing, Carson believed, it was not because she \u201cdeliberately put it there\u201d but because no one could write truthfully about nature \u201cand leave out the poetry.\u201d <\/p>\n

It was a radical idea \u2014 that truth and beauty are not in rivalry but in reciprocity, that to write about science with feeling is not to diminish its authority but to deepen it. Rachel Carson was modeling a new possibility for generations of writers to come, blurring the line between where science ends and poetry begins in the work of wonder. <\/p>\n

That was the ethos she took to \u201cthe writing of the wind on the sky,\u201d detailing the science of each of the main cloud classes and celebrating them as \u201cthe cosmic symbols of a process without which life itself could not exist on earth.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

After coming upon fragments of Carson\u2019s long-lost television script via Orion<\/em><\/a> magazine, the artist Nikki McClure<\/a> \u2014 who, like Carson, grew up in nature, worked for a while at the Department of Ecology, and finds daily delight in watching birds under the cedar canopy by her home \u2014 was moved to track down the complete original and bring it to life in lyrical illustrations: Something About the Sky<\/em><\/strong><\/a> (public library<\/em><\/a>) was born.<\/p>\n

Known for her singular cut-paper art<\/a>, with its stark contrasts and sharp contours, she embraced the creative challenge of finding a whole new technique for channeling the softness of the sky. Using paper from a long-ago trip to Japan and sumi ink she freely applied with brushes, she let the gentle work of gravity and fluid dynamics pool and fade the mostly blue and black hues into textured layers \u2014 a process of \u201cpossibility and chance.\u201d Then, as she recounts in an illustrator\u2019s note at the back of the book, she \u201ccut images with the paper, not just from it\u201d: \u201cThe paper and I had a conversation about what might happen.\u201d<\/p>\n

What emerges is a tender visual poem, as boldly defiant of category as Carson\u2019s writing.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Although Carson never wrote explicitly for children, she wrote in the language of children: wonder. Among the boxes of fan mail at the Beinecke is a letter from a geology professor who, after comparing her to Goethe, told her how enthralled his eight-year-old son was with her words. <\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Less than a year after Something about the Sky<\/em> aired, Carson adopted her twice-orphaned grand-nephew Roger \u2014 the small boy romping across McClure\u2019s illustrations. In what began as an article for Woman\u2019s Home Companion and was later expanded into the posthumously published book The Sense of Wonder<\/em><\/a>, she wrote:<\/p>\n

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A child\u2019s world is fresh and new and beautiful, full of wonder and excitement. It is our misfortune that for most of us that clear-eyed vision, that true instinct for what is beautiful and awe-inspiring, is dimmed and even lost before we reach adulthood. If I had influence with the good fairy who is supposed to preside over the christening of all children I should ask that her gift to each child in the world be a sense of wonder so indestructible that it would last throughout life, as an unfailing antidote against the boredom and disenchantments of later years, the sterile preoccupation with things that are artificial, the alienation from the sources of our strength.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Couple Something About the Sky<\/em><\/strong><\/a> with the animated story of how the clouds got their names<\/a>, then revisit Carson on writing and the loneliness of creative work<\/a> and the ocean and the meaning of life<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

\"Profit<\/a>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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